3 | Book-marketing secrets
1. “I wrote the book as a manual for my students”
“I lived and breathed and sat in the ditches with this material.”
Time and time again, this is what I hear from top selling self-help nonfiction authors.
Want to write a book that creates real change in readers?
Find a way to teach it over and over and over again.
This even goes back to How To Win Friends and Influence People and Dale Carnegie, who taught the topic to thousands of students at his local YMCA before writing the book.
2. “Boom! It’s gonna kill…it doesn’t kill, it crawls”
“Publisher was lovely, but didn’t get a lot of support in the beginning.”
Unfortunately, not the first time we’ve heard this…
Mark attributes the millions of copies sold to a few initial marketing efforts to get the word out:
- Podcasting: “I podcasted a LOT and I was passionate.” If you’re not crazy about your content, don’t expect people to buy your book from a podcast guest spot (after personally interviewing Mark, I can attest that he’s one of the most passionate guests I’ve ever had).
- TikTok: “People would TikTok it. I don’t do TikTok, I don’t even know TikTok. But an influencer would post about it, and I’d sell 4,000 copies that day.”
My take on why it was “TikTok-ed”: This goes back to just writing a good book that truly resonates with people because Mark had spent decades “in the trenches” teaching it.
- Building super-fans one by one: “If someone took the time to read my book, they earned the respect of my answer.” Mark still personally responds to every reader.
Mark says that the book crawled for 2 years before he started to see it take hold. Again, success doesn’t happen on launch day—it comes from consistently showing up and seeding copies one by one and marketing long enough for word of mouth to take over.
3. One especially unusual thing Mark did:
“I went into every bookstore and signed books all over the place, I’d thank the bookstore owner and ask them if they wanted me to sign their copies”
If someone is browsing through a bookstore and choosing between two books and one of them is signed by the author, which do you think they’re more likely to choose given that the books are similar?
“My first inkling that it was successful was when the small, personal booksellers said it was flying off the shelves.”
Not only was Mark increasing the value of his book to a reader but he was also able to get firsthand knowledge of whether the book was resonating with readers and whether he really just needed to get the word out, knowing that word of mouth would do the rest.
